But what about dual wield?

[edit. Much of this is, while accurate, misleading. Please read More Melee for clarity.]I just finished discussing one vs two hander. And inevitably, “fine, but I use dual wield” comes up. Let’s start with the bottom lines, and then go to numbers, ok?

Before you add talents, spells, enchants, or other specials, two handers do the most DPS, single hand is second, and dual wield is last. If you are looking at flat base DPS, this is the important line.

And

Before you add talents, spells, enchants and other specials, the most hits per battle will be done by dual wield, followed by single hand, followed by two handers.

Let’s break some numbers.

Again, let’s stick with a nominal fact – a 2 hander does 1.33 times the DPS of its 1 handed cousin. Let’s add a second nominal fact. A 2 hander tends to be 50% slower than its 1 handed cousin. So if your one-hand has a weapon speed of 2, its two handed version will be about 3.

We need to add one more fact – hit chance. The base chance of hitting with a one and two handed weapon is 95%. Yes, it can be adjusted both by +hit gear and talents, not to mention the fun of fighting mobs and players of other levels than ours. But I’m sticking to the basics here. So basically, for our sub-40 player, the base chance to hit is 95%. Dual wield has an additional 19% penalty, which means that EACH weapon wielded has a hit chance of 76%.

One more fact and we can get to thinking about the implications. When dual wielding, the offhand weapon does 50% its normal damage.

With this, we can figure the “true” dps of all three category of weapon. We’ll assume our nominal 10 dps onehand – adjust to your level.

“But,” you cry, “Then why bother dual wielding? I mean, besides it looking cool and everything…” Because of talents and spells and enchants.

The rogue’s got a talent (or did, haven’t checked recently) that makes the offhand have a damage of .75 instead of .5. For that player, the dual wield is (.76 * 17.5) = 13.3 DPS. That’s pretty much a no-brainer. For the other players, the magic is in the number of hits. (Actually this matters to the rogue too, but we’ll ignore those scurvy fellows for a bit, shall we?)

The magic phrase, regardless of talent/spell/enchant, is “chance on hit”. “chance to” is a proc per minute effect, which means you’ll get that many over a minute regardless how many times you hit. Well, with some “instant” caveats that I’m not going into at this time. Anyway, “chance on hit” is a flat percentage chance, and the more often you hit the more often you’ll see this proc. One limiter to it, of course, is what’s called the “hidden cooldown”. Some serious theorycrafters think they’ve identified some of these – times when regardless what the odds say, if it’s too soon, the proc just doesn’t trigger. I’m going to ignore this too, for a moment – basics, remember?

Let’s assume our nominal WS2 single (and dual wield)/ WS3 twohand in a full one-minute fight. (I know, but we need the time to see the effect). Remember our hit chances apply.

So anything “on hit” is almost three times as likely with dual wield as it is with a two hander.

Which means that if frequency of hit is the key, dual wield wins.

One more bit of adjustment before I quit, though it’s not going to apply to the under 40 crowd – in fact, probably not for anyone under 60 for the most part. That’s a return to that bit about “hit rate”.

If you plan to dual wield “just because”, then +hit gear is extremely important. Remember that our “base” DPS is 9.234, and the two-hander blows it away with12.635. Let’s assume, for a moment, that you get enough hit rating to cap both – 99% all the way around. Yes, the twohand wielder needed less +hit than you, but bear with me.

2hand: .99 * 1.33 * 10 = 13.167.

Dual: .99 * 15 = 14.85

Yeah, that’s the ticket. So to repeat myself…

If you’ve no talents or other multipliers, then for DPS consideration alone 2 hand beats 1 hand beats dual wield. For number of hits per interval, dual wield beats one hand beats two hand.

Which is better depends on what you need. Plus, of course, what talents, enchants, gear, and other things you have which shift the numbers. Still, there’s the basics.

About…

I've experience with many priests of many races and specs on several servers. The more I play, the more I realize how much I do not yet know. This is a share of some of what I have learned.
My main these days is Zingiber on the Undermine server.